Undoubtedly, the context of Sri Lanka is a complex one. The country has suffered from sporadic civil war since 1983 and in 2008, at the time when the assessment was conducted, Sri Lanka had entered a new period of open conflict, after the abrogation of the ceasefire in early January of that year. The field assessment revealed a number of connections between conflict, displacement and disability.
The rebellion by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in northern Uganda left a terrible legacy of poverty, mutilation and sickness. It is estimated that 14% of the population suffer from a disability – significantly higher than in other parts of the country. Yet disability has been largely left out of reconstruction and in the villages people with disabilities are often shunned and isolated.
People with disabilities, and especially women with disabilities, are largely ignored by the mainstream HIV/AIDS community even though they are at a heightened risk of contracting HIV/AIDS. All of the risk factors associated with HIV are increased for individuals with disability: poverty, severely limited access to education and health care, lack of information and resources to ensure ‘safer sex’, lack of legal protection, increased risk of violence and rape, vulnerability to substance abuse, and stigma.
Dadaab refugee camp is made up of three separate camps approximately 80 km from the Somali border. As of February 2010 it is the largest contained refugee complex in the world, housing 261,167 registered refugees, 246,646 of whom are Somali. 9,141 registered households in Dadaab include a person living with a disability.
From 2007 UNHCR and its partners scaled down their activities in Kakuma refugee camp, believing that southern Sudanese repatriation would lead to the closing of the camp. Although by the end of May 2009, approximately 36,000 southern Sudanese refugees had…
In Sierra Leone, eleven years after the signing of the Lomé peace accords, which eventually brought a chaotic, decade-long civil war to a formal close, the war continues for a group of people who came to symbolise the horror of the fighting. These are the amputees who, during the war, had their hands or other parts of limbs amputated by rebel forces. Similarly affected are those who lost limbs because of ballistic injuries and those who carry other wounds. If displacement is ended by the free choice to return home or resettle, then many of this group are still displaced.
In March 2008, the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) came into force.
New Zealand’s commitment to ensuring that refugees with a disability are not excluded from the country’s refugee resettlement quota is longstanding. In accepting Asian refugees from Uganda in 1973, Labour Prime Minister Norman Kirk insisted that New Zealand’s refugee intake include a significant proportion of ‘handicapped’ (the terminology has since changed) cases. Reporting Mr Kirk’s announcement, the capital city’s Evening Post newspaper wrote: “New Zealand should not say it wants only ’the best apples in the barrel’.
Each year, the New Zealand government selects 750 refugees for resettlement. Assessment services and support for disability cases among these 750 have improved over the past few years, thanks to strong advocacy from Refugee Services (the primary agency helping refugees to settle within their new communities) and other specialist agencies such as CCS Disability Action. Quota refugees have six weeks of orientation, screening and assessment at the Mangere Reception Centre in Auckland before resettling throughout the country.
Mary, a 26-year old Zimbabwean refugee living in London, stands less than one and a half metres tall and walks with difficulty, a result of restricted growth due to a condition that makes her bones brittle and vulnerable to breaking. Each time she breaks a major bone she faces months in hospital. For this reason, she is terrified of stairs and other such challenges.